One of the few surviving glories of the Hastings seafront was about to be swept away, the Guardian warned last week. Despite local protests, a line of chalets on the front at St Leonards, built in the 1930s, was being demolished at the behest of Hastings council. In terms of local government geography, that statement is irreproachable: the once independent town of St Leonards was merged with Hastings in 1885. Yet the man who created St Leonards would surely have writhed had he lived to read it. For just as the whole point of Hove was that it wasn't Brighton, the whole point of St Leonards, for its founder James Burton, father of the more famous Decimus, was that it wasn't Hastings. "The peculiar advantage of this place as a residence," said a guidebook of 1831, "is that its visitors are not exposed to any of the disagreeable associations which occur in most places ... where the most sudden transitions from grandeur to wretchedness and profligacy may be observed."

That is hardly how the place strikes you now as you leave the station and walk down the drab main shopping street to the sea. But turn west along the front and you come to a spot that commemorates the eastern limits of Burton's original town. In his day, travellers arriving from Hastings entered through an arch, as if to make it clear they'd arrived at somewhere superior. Now there is merely a rock, with a suitable plaque, to establish that this is where James and Decimus Burton's original St Leonards begins. James Burton bought this stretch of seafront and the land just behind it in 1828. A little way west of the rock you come to the core of his project: the Royal Victoria Hotel; the handsome Assembly Rooms behind it; the house that on his arrival he built for himself, now the Crown House pub; and the parish church - a replacement, this, for one that a bomb destroyed in the 1940s. Behind them, climbing the hill, are a cluster of handsome houses grouped around and above a park - notably the Gothic Clock House, which looks like a church; Gloucester Lodge, with its mild hint of fantasy; Burton's own final home, Allegria Court; and North Lodge at the top, where Rider Haggard once lived. In the way of planned towns, this one was rigidly hierarchical. The park was at first a subscription garden, its use confined to well-to-do local householders. Nearby, screened from the view of superior persons, were two areas allotted to those who ministered to their needs: Mercatoria, which provided their shops, and Lavatoria, where lived those armies of washerwomen on which the wellbeing of prosperous England depended.

The fine streets on the hill, far more than the now ravaged seafront, give you the sense of what Burton wanted this place to be. You can see that still more precisely in the picture in the windows of the Burtons' St Leonards Society shop, which shows his original plans and streetscapes of his creation as it was in its best days. The shop cowers beneath Marine Court, a clumping apartment block which its 1930s architects must have hoped would create as big a splash in St Leonards as the now wonderfully refurbished De La Warr Pavilion had done for Bexhill four miles down the road. Hopelessly out of scale with what the Burtons envisaged, it is known by some in the town, not altogether unjustly, as Monstrosity Mansions.

Decimus Burton extended St Leonards westwards and east towards Hastings, with which it joined up. At the eastern end, just before you reach Hastings pier, is Warrior Square, built in the 1850s on the lines of the great seafront squares of Brighton and Hove, but lacking their consistency. At the head of the square is Victoria, staring stoically out to sea. Odd to reflect that but for the quick-witted intervention of two local citizens she might possibly never have lived to be queen. According to a history of St Leonards by J Mainwaring Baines, the future queen and her mother were returning from Hastings when their carriage horses bolted. Thomas Ranger, a publican and shoemaker, and thus part of the Mercatoria class, steadied the horses and saved the carriage from overturning; whereafter, a person of higher class called Pelham Micklethwaite helped the shaken royal ladies to clamber out. Ranger's reward was warm thanks. Micklethwaite, having written to the prime minister to acquaint him with what he had done, was rather more grandly recognised. He was created Sir Pelham Micklethwaite, Bt.